Evidentialism

Evidentialism, in the philosophy of religion, is the position that religious belief is rationally held only if it is supported by sufficient evidence. The position is usually attributed in its modern form to W. K. Clifford’s nineteenth-century essay “The Ethics of Belief,” which contains the often-quoted line: “It is wrong, always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”

Most twentieth-century atheist philosophy of religion, including J. L. Mackie‘s The Miracle of Theism, proceeds on broadly evidentialist assumptions. The arguments for God are evaluated; they are found wanting; therefore, the conclusion goes, theistic belief lacks the evidence required for rationality.

The position has been challenged in two main ways. Reformed Epistemology, following Alvin Plantinga, argues that the evidentialist standard is too strong: it would, applied consistently, also rule out perceptual beliefs, memory beliefs, and belief in other minds. Externalist accounts of justification more generally have argued that what matters for rational belief is not the believer’s possession of evidence but the reliability of the cognitive faculties producing the belief.

The shift Margaret Halloran traces across her year is, in part, a shift in how she relates to evidentialism itself. She arrived at the year a confident evidentialist. She is leaving it less confident, not because she has come to think the arguments for God succeed, but because she is no longer sure the evidentialist standard is the right standard against which they should be measured.